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5 Tips for Choosing the Best Domain Name

Author: Tom Lowery

What's more important than the design of a new website? As someone said, words have meaning and names have power. This is becoming more and more important in the age of internet marketing and branding development.

Many assume the first step to starting your own website is design, but choosing the right domain name is equally important--in fact, perhaps it's the hardest part of the site creation process. If you consider the difficulty in transferring websites to new URLs - not to mention the potential SEO losses that could occur by doing so - it's clear that you need to get things right from the start.

These days it's harder and harder to find an iconic, easy to remember name that also happens to be available. What happens when the domain name you'd like is owned by someone else? You could try to purchase the domain from the owner if it's that important to you (use "whois" to find contact info). But this can sometimes prove costly, especially for a startup that can develop a similar alternative for free.

Most small to medium business sites (those in the top 10 in SERPs) achieve placement in the top 10 rankings using branded keywords. This is just one reason why it's important that your domain name matches your brand.